6 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I especially liked this part:

I do, however, object to some anonymous, scrofulous nerd pumping meaningless drivel into cyberspace at all hours of the day and night simply because he can’t find a girl to sleep with him. These are the sort of wackos who gun down their fellow students at university.

I suspect that the correlation between bloggers and wackos gunning down fellow students is pretty low. It would have to be, if there actually are 70 million bloggers (number from the article).

Sigh.

Are illogical leaps like this okay if the author is part of the legitimate media :-) ?

Don't you find it interesting that this guy pretends to be a professional and decries the unprofessional bloggers. He then proceeds to administer two cheap shots that aren't worthy of a third grader. Your third point is well-taken. Newspapers would be much better off if they just stopped masquerading as professional journals and admitted their biases. A little intellectual honesty goes a long way.

I think that blogs may be the last bastion of truly free speech. In our society these days, to mention certain (conservative) political leanings is tantamount to professional suicide. Do you really think all those dingbats in Hollywood vote Democrat? Not with their incomes. Yet the publicly acceptable view is that conservatism is evil, bad and wrong and people who vote conservatively are either evil or stupid. That is the expected point of view in much of the Los Angeles area. (I have in-laws out there who try to "enlighten" me every so often, so I get a major dose of what the "beautiful people" think-and therefore, what I should think.)The key case in point of this public bias is the bitter way that the New York Times treated the election of a more conservative, pro-American president. You would have thought they exhumed DeGaulle (sp?). But then again, we are just the vast middle of American who are "so uninformed". I get so tired of feeling patronized all the time.

He's written a deliberately inflammatory column to provoke a reaction that'll, hopefully, have an impact when it's time to renegotiate his contract. Otherwise, there's simply no reason for the "I hate bloggers" column.